Readers' letters: 29.07.2005 Thank you very much for sending me the important information here and on the web site. With all the pain and misconceptions that still exists from the time of the Holocaust it is so important to make sure that the history is accurately reported. I really appreciate your concern in helping achieve this. It was good of you to include us on your mail out. Thank you. Chris Schwarz Founder and Director Galicia Jewish Museum Ul. Dajwor 18 31-052 Krakow Poland www.galiciajewishmuseum.org --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 26.07.2005 I was shocked to hear that my dear Norwegians are having a "black sheep" among them, who writes malicious nonsense about "Polish Nazis" in my beloved Polish Lwow (Lviv). I love Norway and I am reasonably well known in Norway's scientific community, since I had Norwegian students (now prominent professors) from Oslo, Bergen, Tromso etc., and I also received some major Awards, including that in Beito from the Norwegian Biochemical Society. I visited Norway many times, starting just after WWII in 1947; I could read and speak some Norwegian. Would that help to convince the Norwegian media to publish articles rectifying this blatant falsification and also to explain the Polish history of Lwow including its annexation by Soviet Union after the Yalta's treachery? Waclaw Szybalski, University of Wisconsin, USA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 23.07.2005 Good job! All the best, David Chocron, Oslo ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 26.01.2005 During World War II Norway had a Quisling government collaborating with the Nazis, similarly France had the Vichy government, Slovakia had the Father Tiso government, Hungary had the Admiral Horthy government, and so on. The only country occupied by Hitler which did not have a puppet government supporting him was Poland. * Also during World War II aiding Jews was punished by death by nazis only in Poland - not in other countries under Hitler's occupation. The reason was that there were more Jews in Poland than in other countries. In turn, the reason for high Jewish population of Poland was that Jews persecuted in other countries went to Poland where they enjoyed special priviledges - expanded in particular by King Casimir the Great in late XIVth century. My interest in the scurillous accusation by Mr. Steinfeld is personal. My father Ludomir Boncza-Brzostowski was born in what is now Sambir, near Lviv, and he obtained his Doctorate of Law from the University in Lviv before World War II. I visit Lviv from Texas usually once per year - particularly since my doctorate honoris causa in Chemistry from Lvivska Politechnika National University in 1999. The Politechnika was founded in 1844, they awarded their first honarary doctorate only in 1912 - to Maria Sklodowska-Curie. I have never heard during my visits to Ukraine about Polish nazis in the Lviv area. Single individuals working for Hitler existed in all countries under Hitler's rule. However, the Steinfeld accusation is of the wholesale type - and thus an example of history falsification par excellence. Miriam Akavia sent me your letter. Mr. Steinfeld would do well to read her books, published in so many languages including Japanese. Lviv during World War II appears in her books as a location for some of the action. Sincerely yours, Witold Brostow, DSc, FRSC Regents Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of North Texas Member of the European Academy of Sciences, Brussels ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Copy of an earlier letter addressed to Hans Wilhelm Steinfeld and made public by the author through maxveritas.com) Dear Mr. Hans-Wilhelm Steinfeld:
I have read your article "The hatred of Jews, a black page of Polish history" and, quite frankly, am surprised that someone who calls himself a historian could write such a shoddy piece. I will take but one example in order not to be labour the obvious.
You cite Leon Uris, who is no historian, for the claim that the Home Army rejected a plea for arms from the Warsaw ghetto fighter. Strange, Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Jewish Fighting Organization, who was there, remembers it rather differently: "We didn't get adequate help from the Poles, but without their help we couldn't have started the uprising. ... You have to remember that the Poles themselves were short of arms. The guilty party is
Nazism, fascism-not the Poles." Marian Fuks, a historian at Warsaw's Jewish Historical Institute summed it up thus:
"It is an absolutely certain fact that without help and even active participation of the Polish resistance movement it would not have been possible at all to bring about the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto."
American historian Richard Lukas has described the assistance in his important book "The Forgotten Holocaust":
"After the armed resistance of the Jews during the period January 18-22, 1943, the attitude of the AK [Armia Krajowa-Home Army] toward giving additional arms to the Jews changed. This change reflected the positive views of Poles who praised Jewish heroism and even inflated Jewish achievements against the Nazis. According to the official Polish history of the AK, [General Stefan Grot-] Rowecki's organization gave the following arms and supplies to the ZOB [Jewish Fighting Organization] prior to the Ghetto Uprising of April 1943: 90 pistols with magazines and ammunition, 500 defensive hand grenades, 100 offensive hand grenades, 15 kilograms of explosives with fuses and detonators [80 kilos according to Henryk Woliñski, the Home Army's liaison with the ZOB], 1 light machine gun, 1 submachine gun, and material to make Molotov cocktails and sabotage material such as time bombs and safety fuses. The AK and its affiliates aided the ZOB in purchasing arms on the black market, a practice in which the AK also engaged. Zegota also allocated some of its funds for the purchase of arms for the Jewish resistance.
In addition, two organizations, part of the AK-the Polish People's Independence Action (PLAN-Polska Ludowa Akcja Niepodleglosciowa [the armed section of the Democratic Part in the Polish underground]) and the Security Corps (KB-Korpus Bezbieczeñstwa [a kind of military police responsible for security within the Home Army])-gave the Jewish Military Union (ZZW), an independent Jewish resistance group, aid in acquiring arms and ammunition. According to Henryk Iwanski, who distinguished himself along with other members of his unit, the KB provided the ZZW with 2 heavy machine guns, 4 light machine guns, 21 submachine guns, 30 rifles, 50 pistols, and over 400 grenades. The aid of the [communist] People's Guard was the most modest: 25 rifles and 2 boxes of ammunition. ...
In comparison to the existing supply of arms in the AK, the amount of arms and ammunition given by the AK to the ZOB was small. ... But the AK had only a few anti-tank rifles and anti-tank guns in its arsenal in Warsaw, and these were the types of weapons the Jews needed in order to prolong the struggle. Even Schwarzbart [a Jewish representative in the Polish government exiled in London] saw clearly that it was not merely a matter of giving the Jewish resistance more weapons. The critical problem for the Jews and the AK was the lack of heavy arms ...
It would have been unreasonable to have expected the AK to divest itself entirely of these few heavy weapons that it would obviously need for launching the long-planned general uprising when the Germans were at the point of military collapse. To be sure, the Poles could have given more pistols and rifles to the Jews, but smaller weapons of this type would not have altered the military situation in Jewish favor against the Germans. Moreover, it is not entirely clear how many of these guns were the personal weapons of members of the AK who, like soldiers anywhere, would have been reluctant to part with them. Despite what appears to be impressive numbers of weapons in the AK in 1943-44, a large amount of these arms that had been buried after the September campaign were unusable. There were perennial shortages of ammunition in the AK, too. Air drops of arms and supplies had no appreciable impact on weapons shortages until 1943. .the extensive shortage of weapons in the AK was dramatized when it launched the Warsaw Uprising on August 1, 1944, more than a year after the ghetto insurgency: only 10 percent of its soldiers were properly armed. Although recent historians have been critical of the amount of AK aid to the Jews prior to the Ghetto Uprising, Wilner and Berman considered the help."generous and honest," a view confirmed by General Bór[-Komorowski]'s contacts with Jewish emissaries from the ghetto. Michael Borwicz, a Jew who fought in the AK, remarked later, "The cooperation of the AK was real and substantial even though it did not measure up to the enormity of the events."
Responsible Jewish leaders in Warsaw were fully aware that by resisting the Germans, the Jews had no chance to survive if they remained in the ghetto. ... there were no Jewish illusions about defeating the Germans. Shortly after the uprising was launched in April 1943, Jewish representatives radioed Zygielbojm and Schwarzbart in London: "The result of the battle was decided from the outset. ... We will fight to the last." At no time did responsible Jewish leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto, except perhaps [Mordechai] Anielewicz, expect the AK to squander its strength and join the Jews in a suicidal uprising. Nor did they have the right to do so. As Woliñski aptly suggested, any uprising by the AK at the time would have been "pointless."
... The only reasonable option open to the AK was to initiate diversionary attacks when the Jewish uprising began."
When Istvan Deak, a renowned Holocaust scholar at Columbia University, addressed this topic in the prestigious "New York Review of Books," he noted that General Stroop, in his report on the quelling of the ghetto uprising, wrote that his soldiers "have been repeatedly shot at from outside the ghetto." This prompted Istvan Deak to ask: "I wonder whether anyone fired a shot elsewhere in Europe on behalf of persecuted Jews." You might also find his remarks about Norway to be informative:
"Norway's Response to the Holocaust," by Samuel Abrahamsen, is a book sponsored by the "Thanks to Scandinavia" Foundation(New York: Holocaust Library, 1991), but having read this eminently objective account, I wonder why Jews should be particularly thankful, at least in the case of Norway. Nearly half of that country's minuscule Jewish population of 1,600 (0.05 percent of the total population) was killed during the war and, as Abrahamsen, a professor emeritus at Brooklyn College in New York, points out, none would have died without Norwegian collaboration. Norway had only a few convinced Nazis but enough anti-Semites and law-abiding policemen and bureaucrats to make the Final Solution a near-success. To begin with, the small number of Jews in Norway was the result of a long and, at least to me, astonishing tradition of anti-Semitism combined with an extremely restrictive interwar immigration law that kept out nearly all refugees from Nazi terror. During the war, many Norwegians who would otherwise not have helped the Germans, took part in registering, arresting, and handing over Jews to the German authorities. As for the powerful Norwegian resistance movement, it resembled all the other European resistance movements in caring little about what happened to the Jews. Just as elsewhere, there were thousands of decent Norwegians who helped hundreds of Jews escape, for the most part across the Swedish border."
See István Deák, "Holocaust Heroes," The New York Review of Books, November 5, 1992.
But I digress, as did your tedious and ill-informed reply to Poland's ambassador. The only question at issue is your statement:
"Definitely yes - from Communist Russians in the east to expressed Polish Nazis in the Lviv region there is a rich diversity in the intermediate sphere of the society."
Who are these mysterious Polish Nazis in Lviv? What is the name of their organization? Where is their headquarters? How does their number compare, say, to Nazis in Oslo? Why did they warrant a mention when the the xenophobic threat in the Lviv region are clearly Ukrainian ultranationalists.
R. Tyndorf
Toronto ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 20.07.2005 Our highest respect to the persons who spent time investigating Mr. Steinfelds lies. Hope that justice will be made soon and that no more untrue, racist and prejudice-spreading CRAP like this ever will be published again. Thank you and good luck/ from Stockholm and Rome. Name: Ania & Carlo
Email: ania_g@hotmail.com
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